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Hell's Kitchen attitude, New York state of mind
In the first excerpt from Mosaic: Past Time in Hell’s Kitchen, Michael Slattery’s memoir, oral history and love letter to Hell’s Kitchen, he looks back to the 1960s, when the Printing High School was in its heyday and also played a big part in the sporting endeavors of the neighborhood’s youngsters.
The playground in DeWitt Clinton Park was quiet on weekends now. The regular roller hockey players who remained in the neighborhood dropped out of high school for high-paying construction jobs — and found themselves building new high schools in Hell’s Kitchen.
On the wings of white flight to small towns without a subway station but a railroad stop, propelled by the wave of Puerto Rican immigrants arriving in Hell’s Kitchen, the locally organized teams and the informal schedule of roller hockey games came to an end.
On W49th Street, a short walk from Madison Square Garden, a long row of tenements were condemned and demolished, as well as the tenements behind them on W50th Street, to make way for the Printing High School, built using the steel and glass of the popular international style. The architecturally ornate public school in the Gothic style with stone carvings, like those designed in Hell’s Kitchen by Charles BJ Snyder, that covered the entire lot, was outdated.
The new minimalism with an abundance of open space on the building site allowed for light and air and outdoor recreational space for students. This new high school was out of character with the surrounding tenements, except for the alignment of their roofs, and inhospitable to the vibrant pigeon population for whom the lintels of the demolished tenements were home.
Along 49th Street, the Printing School reflected the new urban paradigm of open space. A large, open, rectangular, asphalt schoolyard, set six feet below street level, bordered on three sides by concrete walls and steps. Fenced-off handball courts formed the fourth side.
This enclosed space, larger than the playground in the park, as wide as the ice hockey rink in Madison Square Garden, was an ideal roller hockey rink for Hell’s Kitchen. Kelly and Gruzen, the school’s designer, advocated for modern architecture in the building of new schools, and embraced Le Corbusier’s vision of open space in urban planning as well as the introduction of art in public projects — which for the Printing School, was an untitled mosaic mural facing 49th Street by Hans Hofmann.
This superior open-space setting, ideal for roller hockey, was not envisioned by Kelly and Gruzen. It embodied some aspects seen in the renovation of DeWitt Clinton Park — an indifference to the recreational needs and interests of the children and teenagers in the neighborhood. The fencing around the new school locked off this alluring space to the roller hockey players, just as the fencing around the playground in the DeWitt Clinton had done.
This empty schoolyard was irresistible to the roller hockey players in Hell’s Kitchen, who developed techniques to scale the locked wrought iron gate to play pick-up games on the weekend and after school. In time, the school custodian abandoned efforts to keep the schoolyard closed, encouraged by the director of the neighborhood’s Police Athletic League and the youth officer at the local police precinct.
With the schoolyard crowded day and night, fall and winter, with roller hockey players, organized leagues were created — preteens on Saturday, teens on Sunday— making this a valuable asset for a neighborhood being uprooted by other master planning principles.
This new trade school would train students for the expected growth of employment in the printing industry. For students arriving and departing this modern school, the first with escalators, the schoolyard was simply a space to walk by on their way to and from the subway station on 8th Avenue or Broadway. Occasionally, a group of students would observe the roller hockey players in the schoolyard, watching the players warm-up shooting the puck at the goalie.
One day, a future printer asked if he could take a turn playing goal. Two brothers, who attended the Catholic grammar school and lived in the tenement building across the street and were in the schoolyard every afternoon, could not resist this opportunity to introduce him to Hell’s Kitchen and hockey. The future printer put on the blocker, catching glove, picked up the goalie stick, and stood in the goal.
The brothers shot the puck, a worn roll of electrical tape, easy and low, which he could stop with the stick. They began lifting the puck gently waist high to his glove hand, which he caught easily. Growing more confident, he began to display a cockiness, as if to say this game wasn’t so hard and that these two young boys were no match for this brave high school student.
Sensing the challenge, the brothers began shooting the puck harder and quicker. Soon, this student’s success at catching the puck disappeared. They directed the next series of shots at his unprotected head. He ducked quickly enough to avoid getting hit. When a shot grazed the top of his head, he offered an excuse to leave, departing quickly from the schoolyard to the subway station.
Within 20 years of the school’s completion in 1959, more than 50 percent of the city’s industrial jobs were gone and the printing industry was being revolutionized and automated, joining the shipping industry in the loss of industrial jobs and in the transformation of life in Hell’s Kitchen.
Mosaic: Past Time in Hell’s Kitchen is available to order online via the publisher Xlibris. Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing more excerpts from Michael’s book, spotlighting the voices and memories that shaped Hell’s Kitchen’s past and continue to echo through the neighborhood today. In our interview with the author, we discovered more about the inspiration behind the book.
Mosaic: Past Time in Hell’s Kitchen is available to order online via the publisher Xlibris. Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing more excerpts from Michael’s book, spotlighting the voices and memories that shaped Hell’s Kitchen’s past and continue to echo through the neighborhood today. In our interview with the author, we discovered more about the inspiration behind the book.
Michael Slattery is a lifelong Hell’s Kitchen native whose memories of tenement life, street hockey, and the bustling West Side piers inspired his book Mosaic: Past Time in Hell’s Kitchen. Drawing on decades of interviews he recorded with neighbors, Slattery weaves together oral history and memoir to preserve the stories of a community in flux. Though retired, he continues to see his work as an act of love for the neighborhood he has always called home.
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